Sramana Mitra: So you’ve been around doing this company for a while. Art Papas: Yes, we started in 1999. I stayed at Thomson for a year after college. Then, I went and joined another startup that I didn’t enjoy at all. Sramana Mitra: You really wanted to be on your own. Art Papas: I really did.
Sramana Mitra: Besides that differentiator, how do you acquire customers? Kristin Quinlan: A lot of our growth has been through outreach from our sales team as well as from leveraging the relationships with one entity and being recommended to others. We are really good at what we do and we have got an exceedingly strong
When Art started Bullhorn, the first idea didn’t stick, and much of the venture capital raised during the first dotcom bubble was exhausted. Read how Art pivoted out of that bind, bootstrapping his way to success. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born
Sramana Mitra: You came on board in 2000. The business was about $1.9 million. Kristin Quinlan: Yes. In 2001, it was about $1.9 million. We had a slow incline. We’ve never had a year that has gone down. Every year has been an increase from the previous year. The first early years were very slow.
Sramana Mitra: We’re doing an Entrepreneur Journey story. We’ve got to focus on a bit more chronological telling of the story of how you put one foot before the other. I realized that you didn’t become the CEO of the company until 2006 but I do need to capture some of the beginning story of
Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have now? Patrick Kerpan: We’ve got more than a thousand connected customers. We don’t get visibility in some of them because with some partners, we only get the net dollar. We used to be able to track every customer and knew every use case they were doing. We just
Sramana Mitra: We are huge believers in content marketing. That’s the only kind of marketing that we do. Patrick Kerpan: We clearly lost some opportunities but for a small company, we would never hear from customers until they were POC complete. They’d go to Amazon. They’d use the free edition. They had tried it and
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. There is a trend among entrepreneurs wanting to keep running companies without seeking an exit. Certified Languages International (CLI) is one such evergreen company. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where